Hesitating Before the Judgment of History (2012)

The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 71, No. 1 (February) 2012: 103–114. © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2012 doi:10.1017/S0021911811002932 Hesitating before the Judgment of History TIMOTHY BROOK The ubiquitous experience of wartime collaboration in East Asia has not yet undergone the analysis that its counterpart in Europe has received. The diffi- culty has to do with the political legacies that the denunciation of collaboration legitimized, as well as the continuing hegemony of the discourse of nationalism. Both inhibitors encourage the condemnation of collaboration rather than its his- toricization. Reflecting briefly on the 1946 trial of Liang Hongzhi, China’s first head of state under the Japanese, this essay argues that the historian’s task is not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject. In the face of the natural impulse to render judgment, this essay argues for the wisdom of hesitation. ODAY HISTORIANS HESITATE TO judge collaborators with the Axis powers in “ ” TWorld War II, writes John Treat. This hesitation, he worries, is not a good thing, for it flees from the moral obligation to make judgments. Collabor- ation cannot be assessed in this way as a merely historical question. It must be encountered as an existential one and perceived in relation to “what we funda- mentally are,” he argues. I shall propose the opposite. Hesitation is not widely regarded as a moral virtue. We admire those who act “without a moment’s hesitation,” as the saying goes, and disdain those who delay leaping from impulse to action. Hesitation is a barrier to authenticity, a symptom of moral weakness, a retreat from the obligation to act—from what philosophers from Confucius to the late Ming spoke of as budeyi, the “inability to stop oneself” when faced with a clear moral choice. He who hesitates is lost, as the eighteenth- century adage goes. Dismissing hesitation, we have abandoned Locke for Rous- seau. One of Locke’s insights in the second edition of his “Essay concerning Human Understanding” is that a morally satisfactory judgment depends on the mind’s “power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires”—including the desire to judge good and evil. This power of suspension is vital for insulating the will from the desires that motivate it. Through “due, and repeated Contemplation,” hesitation allows us to anticipate the consequences of our judgments prior to dispensing them, making it the source of our freedom Timothy Brook ([email protected]) is Professor of History and Republic of China Chair in the Department of History, University of British Columbia 104 Timothy Brook (Chappell 2007, 153–54; Mink 2009, 40–46). In our present Rousseauian state, however, the romance of emotional vitality trumps the effort of contemplation. Desire is seen as the path to truth, moral spontaneity precedes moral certainty, and our epistemologies fill up with whatever we believe to be true. THE HISTORY OF A CONCEPT Collaboration sits among these moral certainties. The very word is loaded with moral failure. This is a late development, and it is worth asking why. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary provides only one definition for the word “collaboration”: “united labor, co-operation.” Not until the 1972 Sup- plement does a second meaning appear: “traitorous cooperation with the enemy.” The earliest citation given is a negative reference to Marshal Philippe Pétain in an article in the Economist dated October 26, 1940. The word must have been on everyone’s lips, for Pétain himself used it four days later on French radio after his first fateful meeting with Adolf Hitler at Montoire, saying that “a collaboration has been envisioned between our two countries.” The four-day lag spares Pétain from the ignominy of having singlehandedly tainted the word, though if we move back three years to an earlier phase of World War II, we discover that Chinese were already using hezuo, “working together” (“col-laborating”), to describe the new relationship imposed on Chinese under Japanese occupation. (Curiously, hezuo has managed to preserve its neutral meaning to a degree that “collaboration” has not, rendering it unsatis- factory as a translation of the European term in its second sense.) That the word should gain this connotation in 1937/1940 is hardly random. Massive military occupation was not invented in those years—Japan’s occupation of Korea earlier in the century is an excellent case in point—but something else was: the idea that an individual could collaborate with a nation. The OED exem- plifies its original definition by speaking of cooperation in “literary, artistic, or scientific work,” that is, cooperation between individuals, as John Treat notes. What changed in the 1930s was the capacity of an individual to be in such a relationship with another nation. The idea that the nation could be the sort of entity with which a person could have a relationship was not new, of course. Its transformation in Europe began at least as early as the eighteenth century, when the Swiss diplomat Emer de Vattel laid out new rules of international coex- istence in The Laws of Nations, rules that are by and large still with us. The reign- ing idea of the book is that the principal actors in international relations are precisely that: impersonal nations, not personal sovereigns (1883, 19–20). Through the nineteenth century, the status of nation in Vattel’s sense was reserved for Europe and parts of the Americas. Only in the twentieth century, as imperialism lost legitimacy and collapsed, did former colonies clamor to be treated as nations with all the rights and obligations of which Vattel wrote. The Hesitating before the Judgment of History 105 wave of decolonization generated the productive confusion of “competing nationalisms” (Bickers and Wasserstrom 1995, 460), though almost all these visions accepted the premise that everyone should have a nation, and each individual only one. Nationalism supposed absolute loyalty. How was then a nation to justify what it was doing when it invaded another nation? Colonialism was in foul odor, and in 1928 the Kellogg-Briand Pact declared military occupation illegal. The solution for both Japan and Germany was to assert that they were pursuing not conquest but rather collaboration. Nationalism, which claimed both the legitimate inviolability of the nation and the exclusive loyalty of the citizen, made it absolutely essential that they do so. From the invention of collaboration between nations devolved the invention of collaboration between the individual and the nation to which he had now been made to belong. Treason being a pre-national concept, nationalism demanded a new concept redolent of improper liaisons and denied parentage, and collaboration became nationalism’s evil twin. THE MYTH OF RESISTANCE Just as collaboration depended on nationalism for its conceptual coherence when the word was coined, it depends on it now when we invoke the term to characterize political acts in the past. It is on this second dependence that I want to reflect in this essay. My starting point will be the unexceptional obser- vation that most people under military occupation have no choice but to work under, oftentimes with and sometimes even directly for, the occupier. This work can be imagined across a wide spectrum, ranging from doing nothing to impede the occupation to providing simple goods and services to actively promot- ing the interests of the occupier (and oneself) at the expense of the occupied. The post-occupation argument that one did nothing to further the occupier’s schemes carried little weight in the aftermath of a war, least of all with those who returned to the de-occupied zone and were eager to parlay their resistance into tangible benefits. Most postwar dispensations quickly swept the problem of collaboration under the rug in the interests of reforging unity and installing a new leadership. We see this most vividly in the case of France, where Charles de Gaulle was effec- tive in creating the illusion of national unity under his leadership by mythologiz- ing the resistance into a movement in which everyone participated. This fiction only began to unravel in 1968, when the next generation discovered to its dismay that most of those who basked in the glory of the resistance did little of the sort. Once Gaullist unity collapsed the following year, it would take another generation to get over the shock of that betrayal, which Henry Rousso (1991) so effectively captured with the term “Vichy syndrome.” Marcel Ophuls brought the question of collaboration to public attention with his 1969 106 Timothy Brook documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity. Collaboration might never have become a lasting issue were it not for Vel’ d’Hiv, the stadium where on July 16–17, 1942 French police rounded up the Jews in Paris for transportation to Auschwitz. Complicity in the Holocaust became the original sin of French collaboration that no excuse could expiate. The public mood in France since Jacques Chirac’s formal apology in 1995 has been to allow some distinction between those who actively pursued the occupier’s interests and those who simply tried to survive under difficult circumstances. The feeling in France now might be summarized using both tendencies of the word by observing that, while most French collaborated in the weak sense, most were not collaborators in the strong sense. No such reconsideration has happened in China since 1949, when moral certainty became the trademark of state ideology. There are enough points of com- parison between occupied China and occupied France to wonder why résistantialisme has survived for so long in China.

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